Ecosystem Services Valuation: An Overview of Methods, Values, and Applications

The literature on ecosystem service valuation has grown considerably in the past decade as nations around the world have moved towards adopting more holistic, systems-level frameworks to managing both marine and terrestrial resources, ones recognizing and accounting for the interconnectedness of all parts of the ecosystem. In these frameworks, economic values are often desired to fully understand trade-offs involving human uses and policy interventions on the ecosystem. In this presentation, I provide an overview of the methods used to estimate the economic value of marine ecosystem services with an emphasis on non-market valuation methods. Additionally, I describe and assess the literature in terms of the types of ecosystem services for which economic values are or could be estimated, the methods used, and examples of studies that illustrate the methods. In addition, I discuss benefit transfer methods used for transferring ecosystem service values for use in policy applications